Praise be our Goddess Madoka, for She died for our sins and gave us hope

Delicious Asuna end card is delicious

Phew! We’re done with Murder Case in the Area. This really was quite a terrible mystery wasn’t it? See, this is why I much preferred Aria as the “starting point” for Asuna x Kirito rather than this. Well, at least we got enough Asuna tsun-tsun action in this episode to justify slogging through it :P.

A-1 did take out quite a number of interesting parts of this side story out, mainly the introduction to Heathcliff, which really further ruined the entire point of this side story. The anime production team seemed much interested in focusing on the “murder mystery” which sucked… so yeah. I don’t blame people dropping this show now… but good things come to those who wait.

Next week, it’s going to be Warmth of the Heart, which is one of the more awesome side stories since it involves dragons and stuff. Plus, Lisbeth finally gets introduced! With that, we should have most of the cast assembled and move back in to the main story…. hopefully. Only main side story left is Yui’s, but that’s after quite a bit of the main story passes.

Dakkar Said,

The pitfall with inserting the side stories is that they’re quite spoilerish often times. With MCitA they had to cut out Heathcliff. With WotH they will have to somehow deal with Asuna explicitly stating her feelings for Kirito to Lisbeth. If they leave it in, it will affect the impression of what originally was the beginning of the novels. If they cut it out…well…as long as it’s just one episode, they can just make it one long dragon fight. After all, if anything can save this show, it’s action sequences.

ThatOneAsianKid Said,

I like how we got a glimpse of Asuna’s friend list, showing Lisbeth, Ashley and Godfree. =P

I don’t know if it would have made the scene better or not … but I would have preferred if they actually showed two of the Laughing Coffin members, Johnny Black and XaXa without their hoods on, exposing Johnny’s flour sack helmet..and more of XaXa’s skull helmet, like in the light novel illustrations.

Algester Said,

ohh god Yui’s introduction side story… yeah… I’m expecting shinn87 to come out of the hole yet once again… and massive amounts of HNNGGHH and nosebleed shall incur… other than that Lizbeth being introduced and dragon poop